In http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet usage, an e-mail bomb is a form of net abuse consisting of sending huge volumes of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_mail to an address in an attempt to overflow the mailbox or overwhelm the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_%28computing%29 where the email address is hosted in a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack. Methods of email bombing

There are two methods of perpetrating an e-mail bomb: mass mailing and list linking.Mass mailing

Mass mailing consists of sending numerous duplicate mails to the same http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address. These types of mail bombs are simple to design but their extreme simplicity means they can be easily detected by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-mail_filtering. Email-bombing using mass mailing is also commonly performed as a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS attack by employing the use of "zombie" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Botnets; hierarchical networks of computers compromised by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malware and under the attacker's control. Similar to their use in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_e-mail, the attacker instructs the botnet to send out millions or even billions of e-mails, but unlike normal botnet spamming, the e-mails are all addressed to only one or a few addresses the attacker wishes to flood. This form of email bombing is similar in purpose to other http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS flooding attacks. As the targets are frequently the dedicated hosts handling website and e-mail accounts of a business, this type of attack can be just as devastating to both services of the host.
This type of attack is more difficult to defend against than a simple mass-mailing bomb because of the multiple source addresses and the possibility of each zombie computer sending a different message or employing stealth techniques to defeat spam filters.List linking

List linking means signing a particular email address up to several email list subscriptions. The victim then has to unsubscribe from these unwanted services manually. In order to prevent this type of bombing, most email subscription services send a confirmation email to a person's inbox when that email is used to register for a subscription.Zip bombing

A http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_bomb is a variant of mail-bombing. After most commercial mail servers began checking mail with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-virus_software and filtering certain malicious file types, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_horse_%28computing%29 tried to send themselves http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_compression into archives, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_%28file_format%29, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAR or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7-Zip. Mail server software was then configured to unpack archives and check their contents as well. That gave http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hats the idea to compose a "bomb" consisting of an enormous text file, containing, for example, only the letter z repeated millions of times. Such a file compresses into a relatively small archive, but its unpacking (especially by early versions of mail servers) would use a high amount of processing power, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAM and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging, which could result in denial of service. Modern mail server computers usually have sufficient intelligence to recognize such attacks as well as sufficient processing power and memory space to process malicious attachments without interruption of service, though some are still susceptible to this technique if the ZIP bomb is mass-mailed.

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